CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Should I Explain Myself to Family I Cut Off?

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Whitney answers two questions from people who have stepped back from a harmful family relationship, but are stuck in what comes next. First, a wife whose husband is facing a serious health issue and wants to share medical information with his brother, knowing it will reach an estranged mother who will use it as a way back in. Second, a woman estranged from a boundary-violating mother wrestling with the pull to explain herself.Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. It's Thursday, which means we are doing a Q&A today. I have two questions today, and they both come from people who've already done a huge amount of work, who are not looking for permission to cut someone off, and who are stuck in the part after you've set the boundary, where you still have to keep making decisions. The first question is from someone whose husband has been estranged from his mother for 15 years. He's now dealing with a serious health issue, and he feels he should pass along his medical history to his brother. other, except they both know that information won't stay with the brother. It'll travel straight back to their mother and she'll use it as a way back in at the exact moment they have the least energy to handle her. The second question is from someone who's been trying for 20 plus years to find a version of contact with her mother that actually feels okay. A mother with no sense of boundaries and they're nine months into distance now and she's sitting with this poll to reach out, explain herself, but being almost certain if she does, she'll get a tearful apology followed by the same behavior. So should she reopen a door when she's fairly certain of what's waiting on the other

side? Before I get into these questions, though, I want to say one thing. Both of these questions involve estrangement and a long history of harm. If you're listening and you're on the other side of one of these, if someone in your family has gone quiet on you and you don't fully understand why, I'd actually ask you to keep listening because I think there's something in here for you as well. If you're working through something like this and you want more than a voicemail answer for me, that's what the Family Cycle Breakers Club is for. It's our membership inside Calling Home with structured groups, including a group specifically for estranged adult children,

plus worksheet, scripts, and clinicians who actually get this. This month we're focused on your relationship with your father in the month of June, and we're going to be looking at eldest daughter syndrome next month in July. You can find all of that at callinghome.co. And if you want your question answered on a Thursday on this podcast, you can send it to me as a voice note or in writing to Whitney at calling home.com. I'm going to go ahead and read that first question. My husband has been estranged from his mother for 15 years. In fact, her behavior got to the point that the only people who do still talk to her are my husband's brother and his wife.

which they do for the sake of the grandchild, in quotes. This can be hard to navigate. My brother-in-law understands, but my sister-in-law thinks we should get over it. Of note, she's only been around 12 years. She doesn't witness the culminating of incidents after years of abuse. We set boundaries and enforce them, like leaving an event when it became clear we were lied to about her presence. We do not trust our sister-in-law at all with this. Currently, my husband has a serious health issue, and he feels he should share this

with his brother for family medical history. The problem is the brother-in-law will share this with his wife and she will share it with my mother-in-law. Neither of us have the bandwidth right now with all we're dealing with to try to handle her coming back into our lives as she does every holiday, calling and crying into our voicemails and mailing cards with non-apologies, which she will inevitably do to make it all about her. My vote is to wait till treatment is over. That way he has the info, but we won't have to deal with two emotional roller coasters at once, but my husband feels guilty. What do you recommend? All right. So as always, I'm going to speak to this issue. Generally, I am a therapist. I am not your therapist. And this is not therapy. We're going to walk through some different things that you could

do in a situation like this. Now, for this caller specifically, it sounds like you have a pretty good grip and evidence on how this is going to go if you share this information. And so if you feel very trusting in your intuition on this. You feel like you've got quite a bit of evidence, which it sounds like you've been through this before, that this is how this is going to be handled, and it's going to create a lot of emotional turmoil for you. And I think it's worth thinking about the timing. I think it's considerate and the right thing to do in a lot of cases to say, we want to share this health information because it could affect other members of our family, even children within the family, future generations, if this is something that is genetic, could be passed

down, it's great that you want to share that with the family. The timing aspect is something I think that seems a little bit more flexible, right? Is there a reason when you ask yourself that you need to share this right now in the midst of the most stressful period for you and your family? Or is it something that can wait? And is your desire to share this on a specific timeline really more about, like I just want to get it over with. I want to tell them so we don't have to worry about it. Do you maybe have some underlying fantasy there of like, I actually hope that they will handle this well or that they're going to be helpful to us? Sometimes that can happen even though you have this really strong evidence that it's not going to go that way. And really playing the tape all the

way through for all the different options, I think would be helpful. So if the two of you could sit down together and say, okay, the first choice is that we share right now and we tell your brother, this person's brother-in-law, about the health issue. And maybe in that we say we would like you to keep this information to yourself. We are not interested in having other people know. We don't have the bandwidth. with like we are telling you this just so that you know for your own family medical history. We're not going to talk about this with mom, with your wife, et cetera. That's one way you could do it. And if you did it that way, what is the best way that could go and what is the worst outcome that could happen?

And obviously, the worst outcome here it sounds like is that that information spreads to your sister-in-law and your mother-in-law and they start calling you and crying and your mother-in-law is being very invasive and not respecting your boundaries and it creates a lot of stress for you during an already stressful time. Best case scenario is they don't share that information. Your mother-in-law doesn't find out. You're able to tell your brother-in-law what's going on. He has the information and you all can just continue with your life. So that's one option, right? The next option is that you just give them the information and you don't ask them to not pass it on, to not tell anyone. You You can just say, we found this out.

I wanted to let you know. Here's the information. End of story. And then you need to decide, okay, how are we going to respond if your brother-in-law, sister-in-law or your mother want to ask more questions? They want to be involved. Is your brother-in-law able to maintain that container around this type of stressful health information to a degree that you feel safe talking about this?

stuff. And then again, best and worst outcome. And then, of course, there's some shades of gray in between on this option. Okay? And I would say the worst is very similar here that your mother-in-law again repeats some of that behavior and you all are under a lot more stress during an already stressful time. The third option is that you don't tell anyone anything until you're a little bit out of the woods. And I think that this is okay if it is, and obviously this is kind of a time limited thing. I don't know particularly with this health information how dangerous or immediate this is and how you might feel about taking some time before you share this. And you might just want to wait until your capacity has improved a little bit and maybe until some of the shock and

overwhelm wears down a little bit. Sometimes when you come from a family where there is a lot of dysfunction or there's estrangement and there's distance and these situations come up, particularly these immediate type of health issues, it can light this fire under you of like, oh, we need to tell people, we need to reconnect, we need to reach out because that's some of the old's additioning coming up of how the family was or how you would like the family to be and it isn't actually that way, right? So can you take a step back and say, you know what? What would it be like just to wait a week? Wait two weeks. Wait a month. What do we have coming up? Is there a certain milestone that we want to get through in terms of the treatment before we decide to share this information or do something

about it. I err on the side of running through all of those different options if you're in a situation like this and then landing on the one that feels like it gives you the most space between your feelings and your reaction and allows you to really make a decision from a place of choice rather than like impulsivity and fear and wanting to do something about this because I think you're so, so right that if you try to take this on during a moment where you are already distressed and dealing with a lot, it's going to backfire. And it's not going to be good for you or your family or your health. So some of that guilt might be coming from this place of like, I feel like I'm concealing information from my family. Like I'm not being honest. And maybe

there's something deeper under that. But you could combat some of that feeling. by saying, you know, they're safe. They're okay. If that if that's the truth, that this is not like an immediate thing, then I'm going to tell them. It's not that I'm going to keep this concealed. I've decided that I want to share this information. It's more that I'm deciding when I want to share it. And the when is very important because I also need to make sure that I am strong and doing well during all of this. And you're allowed to prioritize it. And you're that as well. That's a really good question. You know, in our estranged little child group the other day, we were talking about end of life care and disability and things like that for a parent that you have

a challenging or distant relationship with or an estranged parent. And it was fascinating how people handled this in so many different ways and how they all had such different feelings about it that ranged from like relief to anger to happiness, sadness and like just seeing all the different ways that this can shake out when these type of health issues come up. I want to empower you to step back from any type of narrative that you believe you should be following and think about what is the right thing for all of us right now. What is a way that I can make sure that maybe my family gets this important health information because it's in line with my values, but that I also make sure that I am strong and protected and supported while I go through a

challenging medical issue myself. Thank you again for sending this question in. I hope that this was helpful for anyone going through something similar. And let's go ahead and get to the next question. Caller number two said, I am 40 years old and have been trying to find a way to have a contact that feels right with my mom for at least 20 to 25 years. My mother has no sense for boundaries. In the past, she repeatedly overran mine, like coming as a surprise, even though I asked her not to come, showing up at places she knew I was without me wanting her there, calling and texting massively when I did not have the capacity or time to be there right away. There were tons of small stories from my youth and during my adult life. I was her mental support for her issues with my dad and for problems she felt to have raising my smaller siblings.

This all became very complicated when we got, when we had to have. a kid. I want to share that this caller did say at the start of their email that English is their second language. So if some of this just sounds a little bit choppy, that's why, but we'll get the just of the question just fine. She kept accusing us that we did not properly feed the kid. The kid was not a good eater and I breastfed him for a long time. However, this is not at all an issue anymore. And we felt that she gave us tons of pressure instead of support. She also started to be aggressive against my husband who, lucky enough, is not anxious as everyone in my family, including me, and tried to use me to tell him to be less risky, which he never was. He's a very good father and

very involved, responsible and careful. I regret that it took me so long to see that pattern. I really let her run over him and me to many times before I finally stopped her. After some really huge fights, we finally managed to tell her that she went too far. This happened in one situation where she screamed at me in front of my kid almost two years ago at her house. I stayed quiet and kept on telling her, you went too far, which made her even more aggressive and accusing. Since then, I emotionally detached from her, but still tried to keep her in my life to let her see the kid and be involved. Several times a year, not that often. Last year, then she again did not stop texting and calling after I told her that I am busy right now and finally brought me into the situation to cut contact.

In the end, I more or less stopped answering the phone without explanation simply because I did not have the energy to explain myself again. Since then, she has been aggressive, sent overly huge presence for my kid, told me how she feels in voice messages, but never asked about my feelings, and never offered to talk. I never expected that to be the situation that we would stay in because it was pure desperation in the moment. Now it's been nine months without real contact, and I keep thinking about if and how I could approach her again. I never really explained myself, and that does not feel right. I am thinking about sending a letter or meeting her to tell her how I feel. The thing is, I know she never meant to harm me, but right now I am just so deeply disappointed that she is not

trying to repair at all. What keeps me from being the one to start the contact is that I have the strong feeling she would apologize, cry, be emotional, and then be respectful for a bit, but then just start her behavior again. Or she might use my words against me and tell me it's only in my head and I have always been complicated. So in the end, I am scared of her. But I don't want to punish her. I just don't have the energy to do her work.

I am doing mine, going to therapy, working on my anxiety, reflecting on myself a lot. I don't want this to be the situation forever, but I don't see a way out. One more thing, I have contact with my siblings, even though I kind of assumed that I would be excluded from the family completely, since my mom can be very manipulative and controlling. And from time to time, I talk to my dad. He's more or less waiting that I finally get normal again. These are his words. I feel relieved to have this distance from my mom, but on the other hand, I feel guilty and I'm not sure if this is okay for me as a final status. Thank you for reading this, and for your work. I would appreciate any thoughts and input. Gosh, okay. All right.

I want to speak to people who can relate to this person. And I think that it is a lot of you because I've talked with a lot of you that sounds like this caller. I've done therapy with a lot of you. A lot of you come to our groups at Calling Home and many of you I interviewed for my book. There is a specific population of estranged adults that I think follow this pattern here. And so I want to walk you through what this path tends to look like for someone like this, okay? You have an adult who has dealt with a lot of boundary violations, criticism, overbearing behavior from a parent through childhood and adulthood, okay? I would call this parent a very difficult parent. Sometimes these parents tend to have very authoritarian attitudes like it's my way or the highway, but you're also looking at a parent here in this specific caller's question that presents as highly emotionally immature, cannot regulate their emotions and will do a lot of dumping, like crying,

coming to you in that way as a way to brush things under the rug, move on and put the onus of responsibility back on the adult child to fix the situation and make the parent feel better. You know, I don't know this parent specifically. I can only go off of the fact pattern that I have been given here. But what I find really fascinating about this path that we're talking about is that typically this adult reaches this point like this caller did here, where they kind of snap. And they're like, I just cannot do this anymore. I can't explain myself again. I cannot give a boundary to have you violated over and over and over again. And so I am just going to end this because I can't get on this merry-go-round again. And the parent will often see that as like this

one isolated incident of like, you just stop talking to me. And they're ignoring all the context that came before it. And then after the adult child does the cut off and gets some distance, you start to get into this fantasy again of like maybe if I just explain myself, clearly they're going to get it. Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. But you're at this crossroads where you are feeling like I don't like how it feels that I didn't explain myself before walking away because that's very hard for me to sit with. And I understand that. And I want us to work with that because I have no idea how your parent is going to respond to you, writing her a letter or sitting her down again. And so if you're in this situation where you have done this dance of like, I explained myself,

I tried, I did all this stuff. And then one day I was just like, enough. I'm done. And I walked away. and now I'm wondering what else I can do, I want to validate for you that you did not just do that on a whim. There's a lot of stuff that led to this moment, okay? But because we don't know what your parent is going to do, and I have seen this go a thousand different ways. Yes, there are absolutely parents that when they are given time and space and they do their own work, can repair with them. I've seen it. It happens. A lot of estrangements don't last forever. So we have that as an option. There are also the parents who do nothing with that time and you come back and it's more of the same. And they're the ones that you go back to and you really hurt yourself even more in the process of going back and trying to engage in this fantasy again.

And you hurt yourself and you can possibly open yourself up to truly re-traumatizing yourself and more abuse depending on what your relationship looked like with your parent and the types of behaviors that they engaged in with you. And so I want you to really use your discernment here. Now, when I hear that there is a parent that you do not know what your parent has been doing in those nine months and you don't have any evidence that they have changed at all, worked on anything, I want you to go into it with that mindset. That like, I am choosing to do this because I want to explain myself. I don't know what I'm walking into here.

And I might be walking into just more of the same or worse. And so do I have the support to handle that? Do I feel like if I send a letter or I go and sit down in front of my parent and I share how I'm feeling and I get rejected or they behave in the same way that they have been that I am going to have the internal infrastructure and external infrastructure of support to be able to say, I tried. I said what I wanted to say. they did not receive me and now I am going to go and take care of myself or is this going to harm

me in such a way that I am going to become so dysregulated that I can't work I can't show up for my family I may end up in the hospital I'm re-traumatizing myself I have a mental health crisis of proportions that is completely destabilizing to my life if that has happened to you when you're in contact with your parent you need to think about that if you feel like I want to to do this for me. And even if my parent gives me a bad response, I will feel more secure and okay with myself and be able to move forward because I explained myself and I know that I gave it this one last shot, then I think you should do that. I think that what you get from your parent in that moment is data. And sometimes we need to do it one more time to be able to tell yourself,

I know I explained myself clearly. I ran this by my partner, by my therapist, by my friend. I read it a million times. I spent hours working on this. And you know what? When I sat down with them, they didn't ask me a single question. They didn't try to validate anything. They didn't try to understand.

They just went back into denial, accusations, reversing the blame, like doing a lot of this Darvo, making themselves the victim. that now I know that it's not about how I explain myself or me not being clear enough. And so I'm really glad that I did that because now I can sleep at night knowing that I tried. For some of you, that is the thing that is going to be the gateway to you finally accepting what is and grieving it and finding peace. And that doesn't mean that all of you listening to this necessarily will become estranged from your parent, never speak to them again. but it will give you the security in knowing that before you make a decision about what this relationship is going to look like moving forward, that you presented what you needed, you talked about your feelings in a rational, composed way, you were honest, maybe you were

vulnerable, and the data and information that you got back from your parent is going to allow you to make decisions from that place. And so in this story from this caller, I'm sure, hearing a lot of examples of ways that this mother is not able to exist in a contained relationship that has boundaries. It sounds like a surface level or distant relationship with this type of parent would be very, very challenging, if not impossible. And so this is when the adult child has to think about what would it look like to have a relationship with this parent. And I tell a lot of estranged parents this, that if you would allow distance in your relationship, you could probably have a relationship.

You could maybe even have a pretty decent one. But when there's not allowed to be distance and there's constant encroaching boundary violations, helicoptering, desire for control, that's when you get the ultimate distance, which is estrangement. That's when you get cut off because the relationship cannot exist in the container. And when you're not allowing that to happen, sometimes the only choice is not having any contact. But I think what I hear in this message, if you can relate to this caller's question, is that you're looking for permission to say I've tried enough. And no one else can give you that permission. And I can't know what that looked like specifically for you. And so I think you need to think about what would it be like, what would it take for me to be able to sit with

myself and say, hey, you tried. You did enough. You really, really tried. You were accountable. You did your work. You went to therapy. You've done all this stuff. And this relationship still isn't getting better. What is my role now moving forward? Because I can't carry this all myself. I can't be the only one to fix this. And so what do I want to do to be able to give myself that permission? And for some of you, say, you know what, now that I hear that, and I'm the one that needs to give myself that permission, I'm not going to do anything else. I'm done. And others of you are going to say, I want to write the letter. I want to have the conversation. I want to go to therapy. I feel like I need to do this last thing to really tell me if this is salvageable or not.

And I hope, I really, really hope that a lot of you get good responses from those attempts. That's always what we want, right? And I couch that with the, I don't want you to lose yourself over those endless attempts. And people always have to go back a couple more times, right, than they would like. I think anyone that has been in an abusive relationship or a very toxic dynamic with someone knows that you kind of have to have that feeling sometimes of like I'm ready to walk away. And this is also why I say don't try to tell people you have to end that relationship. You have to walk away. You have to cut them off because that's typically when they isolate more. They pull away from you more and

they feel alone in that. And it's more about like when you're ready to leave and to put it down, I know that you will. And walking away from a relationship with a parent is so difficult and goes so against what we want for ourselves as adults that I know that some of you just, you have to step in the ring again. And some of you will be pleasantly surprised and some of you will be really disappointed and some of you will be further harmed by, but each of you will walk away with another set of information that I hope that you can look at very clearly. And even hearing stories like this, can you listen to this person's question and be like, how do I feel when I hear her story, this person's story being read back to me? Would I hear

this person's story and say, you've done enough? You're allowed to stop. Would I tell them to keep trying and how does that reflect on how I feel about myself? And I always say, you know, I don't know who each of you are that are listening to this show and watching this, that you have to use discernment and think about your own accountability and your own role in your life and the way that you handle relationships to ask yourself. Am I somebody that tends to run away and to not want to explain my feelings or am I somebody that tends to over explain and over-apologize and try excessively to salvage these relationships? And also, what is my family culture around those things? What do we do as a family? Do we brush things under the rug or do we talk about things?

And I think for a lot of you, you are the scapegoat who was always blamed and always apologizing or you grew up in families where no one ever talked about anything. And it was always pushed under the rug. And so you don't want to do that anymore, but you're also prone to falling into that because that's what keeps the peace in the family. That's what you were taught. That's what you always did. And it's hard to break out of that pattern.

And so even if you want to explain yourself in a way that allows yourself to say, you know what, I broke that pattern. I know that I explained myself. I know that I was honest and vulnerable and I shared how I felt and how things affected me. And that's not something that anybody in my family has ever done. And so I did that. And if that leads to the demise of this relationship, okay. You know, that's what happens when we can't take feedback from one another and we can't change and grow. And it's really hard to be in relationships with people that refuse to grow when you are doing so. So thank you so much for this question.

I think a lot of people could probably relate to this. As we wrap up, I want you to think about the difference between giving someone information and giving someone access to you. Those are two totally different things. And you're allowed to kind of protect yourself during a crisis, especially in a dysfunctional family. And if you're listening to this and you're. like the second caller where you're nine months out wondering if you should be the one to reach out

again and explain, you can want to be understood and still not have the energy to keep reaching out and explaining and reaching out and hoping it'll finally make them change can sometimes be a really hard fantasy to break. I think you have to have your own plan and some kind of awareness that this is going to be different for you or for them this time when you go back and you explain yourself if that's what you choose to do. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home, our membership community, we go so much deeper on exactly this. We're talking about estrangement, contact decisions, what you owe people, how to improve your active listening, curiosity, boundaries and families. And we also have a group that's specifically for

estranged and old children like the callers that called in for this episode. We have real tools and people that are doing the same hard work right alongside you. And you can come find us at callinghome.com. And I will be back next Tuesday with another episode where we will be talking about how to be accountable. If there is a question you've been sitting with, you can send it to me at Whitney at calling home.com. And it might be the one that I answer next Thursday. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review or comment on this episode. It helps us keep the show going and free to you.

Thank you for trusting me with your hard questions this week, and I will see you on Tuesday. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collincombe or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.

Thank you.